We work every day many hours in Photoshop. There is nothing like a too fast workflow. This gets to the level that even using menus slows down the work. Here using keyboard shortcuts can help to speed up your workflow. We are not one of those people who know nearly all of the shortcuts but we don't want to live without some more crucial shortcuts.

Note 2: As we show in the second section you can redefine keyboard shortcuts. This means the sequences shown could be different. We would not change common Photoshop shortcuts (makes reading books easier)

Cmd+0

Fit image

Opt+Cmd+0

100% view

Cmd+A

Select all

Cmd+D

Deselect all

Cmd+L

Levels

Cmd+M

Curves

Cmd+Z

Undo last step

Opt+Cmd+I

Resize Image

many more

User defined shortcuts

In the newer versions of Photoshop (at least since CS2)
the user can redefine or introduce new shortcuts. We have only very few new shortcuts but those we don't want to miss. One of those is Image->Crop.... By default Crop does not have a shortcut. But crop is in our work so common that we defined a new shortcut for it.

Call Edit->Keyboard Shortcuts... and you get the following dialog:

Assigning Shift+Cmd+C to Crop

You select the menu entry you want to change

Type the shortcut you want

There may be conflicts that you need to handle (e.g. Shift+Cmd+C was already used but I did not care)

Close dialog with "ok".

Access common used scripts via user defined shortcuts

We use some of our scripts very often and selecting the scripts via File->Scripts->MyScript is very tedious. Here is how you have the script at your fingertips.

We need to create an action first

Here is a crash course how to create such an action:

Create a new Actions Set (or use one you already created)

Create Action Set

Name Action Set

Create and record a new Action

Create a new Action

Name Action

Note: We
could already assign a keyboard shortcut here but defer it to later.